Vanuatu tribe finds international success with film ‘Tanna’

Tribesmen and women from Vanuatu took their own film to the Venice Film Festival.

TANNA

More than 40 years after David Gulpilil ventured from Manin­grida to Cannes with the film Walkabout, a tribe from Vanuatu took their own film to the Venice Film Festival.

And rather than a British director escorting Gulpilil from Arnhem Land, two Australian directors, Bentley Dean and Martin Butler, introduced the Yakel tribe from the Vanuatu island of Tanna to the world.

“JJ”, the only English-speaking member of the 200-odd-member tribe and who collaborated in the production of the feature film, said the Australians were “part of our community”.

“Every night we have kava (with them),” he said. “They shared our food, they lived with us and shared our huts.”

Tanna is the first feature film shot entirely in Vanuatu. It dramatises a real-life Romeo and Juliet-type love story from the 1980s between a young couple from the same tribe, Wawa and Dain.

While it initially feels like a documentary, with images of verdant forest, steaming volcanoes and a traditional tribal lifestyle featuring hunting with bows and arrows, Dean said it was definitely a drama.

“From the story to the surround sound and dramatic score, we wanted to make this look and feel like any other feature film you’d see in a cinema,” said Dean, the co-director with Butler of previous documentaries Contact and First Footprints.

Dean, who was one of the original participants in the 1997 ABC TV travelogue series Race Around The World, had wanted to return to Vanuatu after reporting a story about a cult for SBS’s Dateline.

“I found myself on the lip of a volcano discussing geopolitics with a chief there and thinking: ‘This is amazing, I’ve got to find an excuse to come back, stay longer and learn more’,” he said.

Ten years later, Dean and his wife found themselves with time between jobs. “We always wanted to take the kids to live somewhere that wasn’t the suburbs of Melbourne, so I thought ‘why not Tanna?’,” he said.

The couple took their two- and four-year-old children to live with a hilltop tribe on one of Vanuatu’s southern islands for seven months, collaborating on a possible story as Butler flew in and out.

Members of the tribe, who hosted a world premiere in their village only weeks after Cyclone Pam devastated the archipelago in March, are thrilled with the result.

“In all the decision-making with the story, we all discussed and consulted together, which is our normal way of making decisions,” JJ said. “And to us it was not acting, it was doing what was real. There was nothing difficult at all because we were performing what we were used to in our daily life. We made it.”

They’ve made something more than an anthropological oddity. Dean was awarded best director of photography at the Venice Film Festival.

The film also won the audience award for best feature at the Venice­ International Film Critics’ Week last month.